The Children's Hospital

16

When Jemma was four her mother rescinded a ban on birthday parties, instituted just before she was born, when her brother was three. He’d choked on a penny hidden in a cupcake, and turned as blue as the beautiful birthday sky above him. He always had good weather on his birthday.

Worn down not by Jemma’s as-yet-unskilled nagging, but by the pressure of the first Severna Forest birthday season, her mother reversed herself. Birthday parties had always happened, but this year the party as adult social event had declared itself unbidden. No one knew where it came from, or who summoned it, exactly — no one could recall which parent was the first to serve daiquiris with the cake, or hire a clown who, after the sitters had come to take the children home, slipped out of her big red shoes and baggy blue overalls to belly dance on the dining-room table. Like other transient Forest institutions, it was as suddenly there as it suddenly would be gone, when people would look back at pictures that captured them trying to fellate the ride-pony and wonder, Have I ever been drunker in my life?

In the supermarket Jemma trailed behind her mother. Her brother rode the front of the cart, his back to their mother, hanging on with his fingers and his heels, his back arched and his chest thrust out, a ship’s figurehead, exhorting his captain to go faster and faster, the groceries were all getting away. Jemma followed the white hollows behind her mother’s knees, looking away only to watch when men, and some women, turned their heads to watch her mother step crisply down the aisle. That rainy season she often looked naked under her raincoat. She tended to wear short polyester dresses, hems falling at mid-thigh. Her shiny yellow raincoat fell just above her knees. She always wore heels in the rain.

Jemma cowered away from the shelves. Other children, her brother among them, liked to paw at the variety, and worship clutchingly in the candy aisle. Not Jemma; the tall rows of boxes seemed always about to fall on her, and chocolate packaged bigger than her head made her frightened. From within the glass door of the freezers her image beckoned to her, Come in Jemma, come into the cold. Come eat popsicles and be dead with me!

Also, no matter how hard she tried to keep her mother’s legs directly in front of her, she often became as lost as she’d been in the museum, an experience never any less traumatic for its frequency. It happened this trip, too. She looked away from the legs for a little longer than usual, at a man with a pointy beard who put out his tongue and waggled it at her mother. When he noticed Jemma waggling her tongue back at him, he made a deft motion, sliding a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn with his cart and hurried away, pushing at double speed. Jemma’s mother was nowhere to be found when Jemma turned around, no legs, no body, no shining yellow hat. She turned around again and saw the man’s fleet foot disappearing from the aisle, and then she was alone in the vast canyon of breakfast foods. She froze, tears welling in her eyes but not actually crying. She proceeded cautiously in the direction her mother must have gone, sure that a sudden movement would bring that leering cereal vampire leaping from out of the box to poke her with his sharp fingers.

Out of the canyon, she spotted a yellow hat in the produce section. She hurried that way, sighing at the fake thunder that sounded just as a cool mist began to fall on the vegetables. The hat belonged to a lady expressly not her mother. She was old, and without a raincoat, and wore a housedress that swept to her ankles. Her hairy feet were bunched into a pair of wooden sandals. Jemma, running the last few feet toward the hat, a beacon just above a small hill of peaches, almost collided with her. She caught her devouring a peach, gnawing with her two remaining teeth at the dripping flesh, a little puddle of juice between her feet. She saw Jemma looking and mistook her dashed-hope look for admonition. “I was going to pay for it,” she said, and stalked off, gnawing and sucking.

Jemma looked up to the hill of peaches and saw how all those in sight had been violated, two evenly spaced holes in each one, the flesh poking raggedly through the skin, and juices leaking all down the pile. She thought, I’ll never find my mother, and all the peaches have been murdered, and then she began to cry. Adults descended, as always, as soon as she sent up her signal. “Are you lost?” one asked, as if she could answer them, or needed to. The manager, a familiar face, and almost a friend though he called her Jemima, fetched her and walked her to the front of the store. He was going to let Jemma call for her mother on the public-address system, but just as he put the microphone to her lips she was overcome with her tears again, so it was only her hiccupy little sobs that were broadcast through the store, but that was enough. Her mother came, and Jemma spent the rest of the trip in the cart, among the pounds of flour and sugar and chocolate. Her mother, against the advice of the caterer, was going to make the cake.

They rode home, Jemma with her head against the window, listening to wet-tire noises. Jemma had only rainy birthdays. She’d had a storm as a guest, or a present, on every birthday she could recall, and there was a picture of her unremembered first birthday, Jemma conditioning her hair with cake while lightning flashes in the picture window behind her, a big National Geographic-style strike, forks leaping up from the river to a low belly of cloud. After they were home, as her mother mixed batter in a giant rented bowl, Jemma looked out the window, frowning at the gray sky. “Don’t fret the rain,” her mother told her. “It won’t spoil anything. Come and help me with the cake.”

Her mother gave her a wooden spoon and showed her how to attack the lumps, sweeping them against the side of the bowl and crushing them there. It was fun work, and it calmed her. Jemma forgot about the sky and the rain, captivated by the spiraling motion of her spoon, the furrows in the batter, and the dedicated pursuit of the lump. The great big bowl — the greatest and biggest, her mother said, ever to enter the neighborhood, fetched from a bakery in DC — was set in the middle of the dining-room table. The night previous they’d eaten their dinner around it, plate lips pushed off the table and hovering over their laps, because the bowl hogged so much space. They’d filled it over and over in a dinner game. It was big enough to hold: five hundred eggs, one hundred bottles of beer, a disassembled igloo, the extracted brains of the Senate, this year’s take for the East Coast tooth fairy, six months of poop from the average seven-year-old excreter — this last suggested by her brother, and then her mother declared the game (and dinner, already over anyway) effectively ruined. Jemma could reach to stir only by standing on a chair and leaning over. While her mother was greasing the cake tins, Jemma, chasing after lumps she could barely see in batter that was growing as smooth as cream, leaned too far, lost her balance and her chair, and fell in, hands, arms, shoulders, face, and head. She’d leaned so far that she fell in the center, and the heavy bowl did not tip. It was very quiet in the batter. Opening her mouth, she took a nip, and then another, pleased with the taste, then remembered to breathe, and finally started to cough and struggle. Then her mother pulled her out, Jemma’s hair whipping in a batter-spattering arc, clutching her to her and administering a few unnecessary abdominal thrusts.

Her mother debated the question of continuing with the party, with herself and with silent Jemma as she bathed her. Jemma and Calvin, expelled in their slickers to fetch another pound of flour from Mr. Duffy’s store, left their mother in her thinking position, seated at the dining-room table, among the drying batter, chin on fist, trying to make the serious distinction between omen and accident, to decide between a party the likes of which had not been seen in the world since the last dauphin turned four, or a quiet evening of Chinese food and mere birthday cupcakes. “If it starts to thunder,” she called out after them, “you know what to do!”

A dog leaped out, straining on its chain, all mouth and few teeth, but loud. It belonged to the Nottinghams, who lived at the bottom of the hill in a house too small for their big family. The dog was an old Doberman, quite evil-looking in his prime, now palsied and arthritic and always leaking. But he retained, if not his dignity, at least the one trick of lying in wait for pedestrians or cars coming down the hill, and launching himself out of the tall grass to howl, and hurl spittle, and display his speckled gums. When he presented himself to the two children, Calvin, used to him, stood fast, but Jemma fled across the street, not looking right or left, but running at top speed, her arms flung out to each side and her hat trailing by the chin strap, emitting a high, pure shriek. “Hush, puppy,” her brother said to the dog, who was still baying, snout split almost in a straight line. He bent at his knees and gathered up some wet earth from the side of the road. Winding up, he hurled it straight between the teeth, hard into the gullet. The dog retired back into the tall grass, to cough, gag, and vomit. “It’s okay,” her brother called to Jemma, who was watching from the other side of the street. He held his hand out to her, but she would not come. He had to cross to her.

They walked without speaking, and without speaking her brother added two cherry lollipops to the purchase of the flour. They were halfway home again before he started to talk. He took his lollipop out of his mouth with a wet little pop, and held it at arm’s length. “I remember when I was four,” he said. “That was a good age to be. You’re lucky.”

“I’m lucky,” Jemma agreed, though she did not feel particularly lucky or unlucky.

“Seven is so old. I wish I was four again. That was before I knew.”

“Knew what?”

“Oh, things. You don’t know. You’re too young.”

“I am not.”

“You’re a baby. Lucky baby.” He led her off the road to sit in the wet grass and finish their lollipops, candy being generally discouraged by their mother, and forbidden entirely before the cocktail hour when the whole family would indulge in equivalent vices, Mother and Father in their customary pitcher of martinis, Calvin and Jemma in a single piece of thick, hard chocolate or a piece of hard candy bright as a jewel, everyone sipping or gnawing urbanely in the slanting late-afternoon light. “Listen,” her brother said to her, knocking his lollipop hard against hers to stimulate her attention. “When you’re one you learn to walk. When you’re two you learn to talk. When you’re three you get out of your crib. When you’re four you learn the secret words to command the toilet, to make it come to you. When you’re five you learn how to whistle. When you’re six you learn how to lie. When you’re seven you learn that everyone is lying to you.”

“Nobody’s lying.”

“Everybody’s lying. Mom and Dad, Mrs. Axelrod, Sister Gertrude, Mr. Duffy…” He pointed back down the road toward the store.

“Stop it.”

“I’m lying, too.”

“No you’re not!” Jemma said, shaking her lollipop, trying to hit his lollipop back, but he flicked it back and forth with his fingers, so she kept missing.

“How would you know? You’re too young to tell.”

“Shut up!” She connected violently with his lollipop, cracking it and sending a wedge of it flying off, so the candy center lay exposed. Her brother bit in.

“That’s the spirit,” he said as he chewed, sounding just like their father.

“What?”

“Nothing. Never mind it. Guess what I’m getting you?”

“Who cares,” she said, angry at him now.

“You will,” he said. “Everybody will. It’s only the most important present anybody ever gave anyone. It’s only the most important thing that happened ever.”

“Can I eat it?” she asked.

“Stupid!” he said, and it happened that there was thunder behind him as he spoke, so she dropped back and sat on the grass and raised her arms in front of her face and cried. “Stupid,” he said again, but more gently. “It’s only going, that’s all! Only the most important thing in the world.”

“Will I go too?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “But just watching me will make you the most special girl in the whole world.”

“Will you be able to fly?”

“Certainly,” he said.

“Will I be able to fly?”

“Only when you’re holding my hand.” The thunder rolled again, and he ran off home, dragging her behind him.

“What’s the word?” she asked him before they went in the house, as he wiped the candy stains from around her lips.

“What word?”

“For the toilet. I want to know.”

“Oh. That.” He took her hands and looked at her seriously. “Only the toilet can tell you.”

The party was not canceled. Their mother decided Jemma in the batter had been only Jemma in the batter, and not compassionate fate speaking warning of a greater disaster coming. The perfect rise of the cake in its composite pans, and the way the great J took perfect shape out of the four parts, was a further affirmation, and she welcomed into the house her children, husband, the caterers, the moonwalk technicians — everyone but the clown — with ever-increasing exuberance.

Jemma spent the afternoon in the bathroom, in her new underwear and new shoes, waiting for the toilet to speak. It was one of the chief tortures of her life, waking at night with a full bladder, and facing the choice of having an essentially deliberate accident, or venturing from bed into the dark hall and walking the miles and miles down the telescoping corridor to the green night-light in the bathroom, always so certain that indescribable horror lay on the other side of the door. How perfect, then, and how right, that the toilet should come to her. She’d speak the word into the dark, and it would go whispering out the door and down the hall while she lay safe in bed. The toilet would come thumping down the hall, and nudge the door open like a dog, and sidle up to her bed, the lid rising silently in friendly salute.

“Speak!” she said, again and again, and “I am four today!” but Monsieur Toilet was silent. Her mother had named him that, during Jemma’s vividly remembered toilet-training days. She’d had a fear of him, of being consumed — he was so big, and made such an awful noise, and after the last gasp of the flush the old pipes would moan horribly. Jemma’s mother found a kit in a store, a big plastic smile, flat, friendly blue eyes, a big nose that she thought looked French. A beret from her own collection completed the disguise. Jemma fell in love, or at least into a deep, abiding friendship with the smiling eyes and the unchanging grin. When her mother saw her dancing, Jemma aware that she had to poop but unable to understand it, or how to address it, she would call out in an accented cartoon voice, “O, Jzemma, I am so ongree, so very ongree!”

The face and beret were gone now; he was just a green toilet full of clear green water redolent of fake pine. But Jemma still thought of him as a friend, so it was with a particularly heavy heart that she finally gave up and went back to her room to get into her party dress. She pulled it over her head and went looking for her mother to do up the back. She found her in the basement, overseeing installation of the moonwalk. The rain was increasing when the men tried to inflate it in the side yard. Jemma’s mother threw open the storm doors and beckoned them inside. She was still convincing them to bring the thing in when Jemma found her.

The air pump ran off a little gas engine, but their scenarios of carbon-monoxide poisoning did not discourage Jemma’s mother. “Look around you, gentlemen. Isn’t this room just full of windows? Vent! Vent your hose!” She even helped, a little, with the assembly, though it went against her principles even to twitch a finger in support of a deliveryman. She kicked a screen out of a bottom window, and shoved a hosepipe through. With smudged fingers she buttoned up Jemma’s dress and braided her hair while the castle-shaped moonwalk rose in the eastern half of the room to press and stoop against the ceiling, its highest towers bent perpendicular against white stucco.

“So lovely,” her mother said, turning Jemma around to appraise her. She stared at Jemma dreamily for a few moments, then started from her reverie with a cry, announcing the time. She was still wearing her shopping dress. Her hands were filthy, her hair matted in places with batter, and a thin layer of flour over her face made her look like a corpse. She rushed upstairs, tailed by Jemma. Layer by layer she put on her party clothes and her party face, breaking between steps to finish the preparations. So she admitted the caterers with only half of her pair of eyebrows drawn, and only one set of eyelashes in place; squeezed out a bouquet of white, yellow, and red roses onto the cake in her slip with hair teased high into horns. She passed through many frightening incarnations on her way to the final beauty. It was hard to reconcile the end product, a smooth, pink look only slightly too studied to be natural, with all the stops along the way: Minnie Mouse, Cruella DeVil, Mr. Heat Miser.

The house was similarly transformed in steps into a party palace. A white tent rose in the front yard, sheltering a half-dozen tables draped in white with centerpieces of orange flowers surrounding a candle that would not stay lit because of the wet wind. A band set up on the porch, a plastic parquet dance floor unfolding in squares in front of them as they tuned their instruments. The dining-room table grew to twice its real length, extensions hidden under a pool-sized expanse of tablecloth. Serving stations popped up in the corners of the living room. A bar appeared in the wide hall, complete with a giant silver mirror that Jemma compulsively smudged with her fingers before it was lifted into place. A puppet theater rose on the other side of the basement from the moonwalk. Jemma watched the puppets rehearsing — up to four of them operated at once by a woman who could braid hair with her feet — a princess and a dragon, a knight and a witch, all throwing out their arms and singing “Do, Re, Mi, Fa, So, La.”

By the time Jemma was trying unsuccessfully to zip up her mother’s dress, the clown had arrived. He drove up in a yellow Volkswagen big enough to hold fifty clowns. Jemma watched him emerge from the car, first the requisite big red shoe, distinguished with a coontail at the heel, then hair the very same cornflower blue as her dress, eyes ringed in bruisy purple and green, a hooked nose like a dangling chili that hung straight across the huge lips, painted in a despairing frown. His thin neck, chalk white, disappeared into a Mad-Hatter collar, green on top of an orange shirt. His red frock coat had tails as long as a wedding train; five feet after his bottom they ended in motorized-ferret tail-bearers that chased after him and made figure eights. Green pedal pushers vanished into socks of every color, half the spectrum on the left foot, half on the right. Last to emerge was the other shoe, a surprise black. He removed two giant valises from under the hood of the car and came high-stepping up the walk, revealing under that black shoe the painted image of a squashed kitty.

“Jesus Christ,” her mother said.

“I told you,” said Calvin, watching with them at the window. He hated clowns, and had lobbied hard against summoning one to this party. He was making gestures through the window at him, shaking his fist as if to cast paper, rock, or scissors, but instead flashing strange finger symbols, and muttering under his breath, but Jemma was close enough to hear. “Adonai! Father strike him down!”

“The clown is here!” their father said, coming up behind them and putting a hand on Jemma’s shoulder. “It’s your birthday clown!”

“What were you thinking?” their mother asked their father. “Where did you get that thing? Weren’t there any normal clowns?”

“What?” their father asked, looking genuinely perplexed. “Funny hair, funny nose, great big shoes. It’s not a pony, is it?”

“It’s scaring me already,” said their mother. It had almost arrived at the doorstep when it suddenly dropped its bags and did a sort of disco move, pointing down at the ground and then sweeping arm, hand, and finger up in an arc to point straight up at the sky. Then it fell back onto the thick wet grass, the softest lawn on the hill, and began to shake violently. “Oh God, is it having a seizure?” their mother asked, and then answered her own question. “It’s having a seizure!” Their father rushed out, joined shortly by their Uncle Ned, not a real uncle but a friend and colleague of their father. A crowd gathered, puppet lady and moonwalk techs and bartender and servers all in a semicircle, some asking aloud if this was part of the act, because it wasn’t very funny. “Why did you get an epileptic clown?” their mother asked, brandishing the sterling cake cutter she’d confiscated from a well-meaning but ignorant teenager, who would later be carving out the roast, before he could shove it into the big, sad mouth.

“Like I was supposed to know? Like, what, the ones with blue hair seize on rainy days?”

“Stay calm, everybody,” said Uncle Ned. “The clown’s going to be fine.” He was removing the trembling shoes, for reasons that did not become apparent until after the ambulance had come and gone, carting the clown away down the south side of the hill just as the first guests were beginning to arrive up the north side. A trauma surgeon, he was cool in a crisis, and used to being the only person who knew what to do. Just as Jemma’s mother was most keenly lamenting both the arrival of the clown and its departure, and Jemma’s father was leaving another message with the answering service at the clown agency, Uncle Ned appeared in the shoes, having plundered from the valises and the Volkswagen a traditional round nose, a rainbow afro, and a pair of hairy yellow overalls. “Hey kids!” he said in his sharp, commanding voice, not the least bit goofy and not even particularly friendly.

“I got him,” Calvin said to Jemma as they watched the guests arrive. “Did you see it? I got him.” For the rest of the night he would try to cast seizures at various adults and children and fail, but never accept that his gesturing fingers had only been coincidentally related to the clown’s affliction.

Along with last-minute lessons in extracting a foreign body from a choking victim, and instruction on how to throw herself, belly-first, against the edge of the couch in case she found herself choking in an empty room, Jemma’s mother demonstrated demure postures for Jemma to assume during the party. Her mother, who’d been celebrated herself at parties as a child, said, “You must be in the party but not of the party. Everything will revolve around you, but you mustn’t be frightened when strange people want to hug you, or take your picture while you open a present.” Jemma listened, nodded dutifully; she was obedient, not like her brother, and tried at that age to do good as she understood it. She tried to pose demurely at her mother’s side, receiving the guests. She tried not to loll her tongue out droolingly at the pile of presents she wanted so desperately, not to open, but to climb. She tried not to think about the cake, as big as her whole body, a great J, or the colored cream roses, and how she wanted to make it clear to every person that walked in the door that as birthday girl she had every right to the most rose-afflicted piece of that cake, that if she wanted to she could eat a piece that was all icing and no flesh. She tried not to think of the moonwalk beckoning from downstairs, inviting her to muss her hair, wrinkle her dress, bounce from her knees to her feet to her knees again. She was demure for less than ten minutes.

That was long enough. Her mother had been edging them toward the dance floor as the last guests arrived; at a certain distance it simply sucked her in. “In the party, but not of it,” she whispered to Jemma as a walrusy man swept her onto the porch. Seconds later, Jemma was shoeless in the moonwalk, and of it, bouncing on feet, hands, knees, bottom, head, in a turbulent sea of kids. Her socks dropped in twin bunches to the lowest portion of her ankles. She lost her hair ribbon and her hair frizzed up.

Still shoeless, she watched the puppet show, an interpretation of Hansel and Gretel, delightful for the real candy house that came leaning out of the theater on a long stick, swaying back and forth to be attacked by the audience, the roof shingled with jelly beans meant to picked off at every performance. The witch gave an extended monologue, an apologia for witches, who she maintained were much misunderstood. It was an ovenless show; at the end the children and the witch danced swayingly together and sang an ode to the goddess while a dragon swung above them in a dental-floss harness. The puppets bowed to silence, and there was no applause until the house came leaning out for an encore sweep.

Uncle Ned, less skilled but more traditional than the puppet lady, went over better. He walked unconvincingly against the wind, strummed tunelessly on a ukulele and sang “Camptown Races,” flinging out chorus-girl kicks with every doo-dah, and made huffy, buzzing noises with five kazoos stuck in his mouth, all these efforts received rather coldly. But his balloon animals endeared him to the crowd. He twisted and bent them at random, proclaiming the abstract shapes giraffe, camel, cheetah, aardvark, platypus. He offered up a bonobo, but there were no takers, not even Jemma or her brother. “It’s just a thing,” said a little redheaded girl, who Jemma was quite sure she’d never seen before in her life, of the foot-long, U-shaped chain of balloon sausage. She folded her arms across her spectacular party dress, fancier than Jemma’s, and noticed obsessively by Jemma’s mother, who would ask if this was not like showing up at a wedding in a dress fancier than the bride’s.

“Oh,” said Uncle Ned, clutching the sausage to his chest. “You’ve caught me. Clever as a pony, aren’t you? Well, tain’t no bonobo, certainly. Tain’t no chimp or ape. It is not an orangutan. Neither is it a potato, a piranha, or persnickety Penelope Poekelman, my first wife. What this is, Suzy… is that your name? Well, it’s a good name, and it would suit you fine. Suzy, what I’m holding here in my hands, what I’ll now bring closer to you, closer now, soon it will be touching you, is an exactly-to-scale model of a drippy, stinky, slimy little-girl… intestine!” The redhead screamed, the children cheered. “They’re full of poop,” Uncle Ned added unnecessarily. He sang as he worked, and no child went home that night without a string of intestines to hang around his neck.

More than she ate, Jemma looked at the food, and watched people eating. She plucked a dozen Vienna sausages from off their little beds of prosciutto and crostini and stuffed them one after another into her mouth, crouched behind the biggest couch in the living room, chewing and swallowing in a frenzy, and then she was done feasting. She was very fond of gray meats, Vienna sausages in particular, but number twelve, halfway eaten, became a chore to finish, and she felt a little sick after she had swallowed it down. There was yet room for cake, but she no longer wished to curve her hand into a paw and scoop icing into her mouth. She walked around, looking for her brother, who was running wild with the older set, the eight-, nine-, and ten-year-olds who were dashing up and down the stairs, drawing shouts of “Whoa!” and “Slow down there!” from the adults they grazed. She did not find him, and almost forgot she was looking, her attention was drawn so irresistibly to the open mouths and the small, beautiful arrangements of food that went into them. She’d pause close by them, under the very shadow of the longest chins, and look up at them till they noticed her, and mostly they would mistake her interest in their eating for interest in their food, and offer her a bite, or stuff hastily and then show her empty hands. But she’d scoot away as soon as the eating was done. She saw a lady eat a cracker piled high with black caviar; they broke against her lips, most consumed, some sticking under her nose in a thin mustache, some bouncing off her chin to fall and scatter on the wood floor like pearls off the string. She saw a man consolidate tiny portions of beef tartar into his hand, dumping them out of little mango boats into his palm; when he had a mound the size of a tennis ball he bit into it, gobbling it all down in one rapid fress and then licking his palm like a fond dog. She saw a lady do her same Vienna-sausage trick. She saw her father take two giant shrimp, pink and wet from the biggest shrimp cocktail in Severna Forest history, four-dozen jumbo shrimp, an entire head of lettuce, and a liter of cocktail sauce all arranged among ice in the very same bowl Jemma had toppled into earlier that day. He stuffed them into his mouth, head-first, so the tail hung out in fangs from his lips. He dropped to his knees and growled, friendly and ferocious, at Jemma. She ran away.

She danced in contracting circles around the central table, closer and closer through the crowd until she stood with her eyes level with the edge of the hook in the J. A pink rose as big as her mouth was within reach, but before she could smudge it away her brother collided with her.

“Time to open the presents,” he said, grabbing her hand. His hair, like hers, was characteristically ahoo, sticking up in sweaty horns from dozens of places. He drew her toward the present pile, but halfway there her mother seized her other hand.

“Time to blow out the candles!” she said.

“Time to open the presents,” her brother insisted, tugging, so Jemma’s arms opened at the elbows and she was suspended between them.

“Who’s calling the shots here?” her mother asked. She gave one sharp pull and Jemma’s sweaty hand popped free of her brother’s sweaty hand. There were four rose-shaped candles, spaced close together in a little thicket midway up the body of the J. As they were lit someone turned down the lights. All over the room cameras were cocked and raised. Jemma leaned forward over the cake, not averse to falling into it. She knew it would be so soft. But her parents had her firmly by the arms. They leaned her over the candles after the song. She blew wetly on their count of three, her fierce concentration on the task of extinguishing every candle rewarded with success, but realizing too late she’d been so single-minded she’d forgotten to make the wish. She cut the first piece of cake, her mother’s hand over her own, wielding the silver knife, her mother’s strength smoothing Jemma’s stabbing motions into a straight line. Then she was carried, reaching back for cake, to the foot of the hill of presents.

Her brother mined the mountain, passing boxes, flats, and lumpy ovals to her, running his hand over half the presents before selecting the next to be opened. Jemma oscillated between states of fierce concentration on the unwrapping (no ripper, she did it with care and precision beyond her years, and with respect for every little square of transparent tape) and utter cake-distraction; she could hear, beyond the circle of witnesses around her, exclamations over the quality of the cake, compliments to her mother who, when asked for her baking secret, said that the cake had been flavored with sweet clumsy child. Some of the witnesses had cake and were eating it as they watched her. Some went back for seconds and thirds before she was done with all the opening. She smiled dutifully over the presents, the bionic-woman dolls, the extensive bionic-woman wardrobe, the fembot beauty head whose face you could paint with makeup before you removed it to reveal the two-dimensional circuit board underneath. Jemma did not understand exactly what it meant to be bionic, and her brother would play with the dolls more than she would. Her favorite gifts were a pogo stick, a hula hoop, a saxophone that blew soap bubbles, and a pair of big tough yellow punching balloons. Jemma attached them to both her hands, trying and failing to punch them at the same time and feeling unaccountably mighty.

Sitters had infiltrated the crowd of witnesses long before the mountain was leveled. As soon as the last present was opened and murmured over, they began to whisk the children away to the homes where their parents would not return until after midnight. In the confusion of goodbye kisses and sometimes clutching, tearful hugs, no one heard Jemma’s complaint that she’d eaten no cake. On her way to bed she saw the ugly, decimated cake board, empty except for random smears of icing and a few crumbs. Her father mistook her crying for sadness at the end of the party. He hugged her and rocked her as he carried her up the stairs, acknowledging how sad it was that a party had to end, but what could you do about it? He did not understand the problem until Jemma was in her pajamas, teeth brushed and head on her pillow. “We’ll get you a new cake tomorrow,” he promised her, a whole cake just for herself. He would tie up her mother and Calvin, and lastly himself, and they would all be her observant prisoners as she ate the whole thing. It made her feel no better. She didn’t like the thought of people being tied up, and tomorrow was a thousand years away. Her father sang her a song, and put on a stuffed-animal play for her, but these did nothing to comfort her, for no matter what words her father sang, or what words the animals spoke, every song was a song of cake, and every utterance was in praise of cake, or a lament for cake lost.

When she had stopped crying, her father thought she had fallen asleep. He went back to the party, which by now had put away or transformed all its childish things; the puppet master was interpreting Ionesco; Uncle Ned was smooching a caterer in the basement bathroom; a thin layer of reefer smoke had gathered against the roof of the moonwalk, where there was no more jumping, only lying about in the mellow reduced gravity. For a little while Jemma was quiet, but no less agitated. Many times before she’d drifted off to the noise of a party below her. It usually made her feel comfortable and safe, the noise of voices speaking words she could not make out, the distant music; but not tonight. Instead of sleep came worse misery, a more acute sense of absence of cake in her evening, the thought of the one nip of batter she’d taken a tease and a torture. Worse yet, she suddenly had to pee. She began to weep again, and called out to Monsieur Toilet, asking him please, please come, and to bring cake.

It seemed like forever before her brother came back to her. Forever she was alone and despondent in her pee, cursing her party, her presents, her four years, cursing everything but her lost cake. It was even forever that the candle-glow proceeded him, and flickered in her door, puzzling her. Understanding dawned forever; it took forever to make the transition from rock-bottom despair to topgallant delight, to see the piece of cake her brother was bringing to her.

To any eye but hers it would have appeared ugly. A side piece, with hardly a rose petal on it, half eaten by someone who had lacked a fork or been too excited to bother with one, it was marred with tooth marks, and lipstick stained the eaten edges of the white icing. A cigarette hole stood out plainly next to the candle.

“Follow me,” he said. “It’s time for your present.” He turned and marched solemnly out of the room. She thought he would take her downstairs, and didn’t even remember about the going until they got to his room. There were more candles burning there, stolen birthday candles stuck in upside-down styrofoam cups. There were six of them in an open circle, which, after he had entered it, Calvin closed with the cake.

“What are you doing?” she asked him.

“What does it look like? I’m getting ready to go. What? Why are you crying?”

“I don’t want you to go.”

“Sure you do.”

“I don’t want you to. I like you.”

“That doesn’t have anything to do with it. You’ll like me better, after I’ve gone.”

“But I’m scared.”

“Good. It’s scary. Going is scary. Important things are scary. But it has to happen. You’ll see. You’ll understand. Are you ready?”

“No!”

“Are you ready?” The flickering candles made his frown look like a monster face.

“Okay.”

“All right then,” he said, pulling their father’s straight razor from his pocket. “Here we go. All you have to do is close your eyes and think, Let him go, let him go, let him go. Do it now. You have to say it eleven times slowly, one for every year you are and one for every year I am. Do you understand?”

“Can I have some of my cake?”

“Not yet. But after I go I’ll be able to touch things and turn them to cake. Ready?”

“Ready.” She closed her eyes and started, trying to say it just in her head but the words spilled out of her mind and she heard herself whispering, “Let him go, let him go.” And she added “Jesus please let him go” because she thought that was who would be in charge of such a request.

“Good,” he said. “Keep going. Don’t open your eyes.”

And she wouldn’t have, except that he said not to. So she saw him cutting carefully on his chest, one long line from his shoulder to his hip, and now another on the other side, and she ran from the room, screaming as loud as she could, straight down the hall and down the stairs, and into the middle of the party that had used to be her party. She stood in a circle of her parents’ friends, screaming and screaming until her father picked her up and muffled her mouth with his shoulder.

“Good God, Jemma,” he said. “What’s wrong?”

“She had a nightmare,” Calvin said. His shirt was on and he looked like nothing unusual at all had happened. And he was looking at her, his eye to her eye, and she was sure that she heard him speak then without moving his lips. Don’t tell.

“I won’t,” she said to him.

“Won’t what?” her father said.

“Get any cake,” she said.

“It seems to me that somebody’s had too much cake,” her father said, announcing it to everyone, and suddenly they were all laughing at her.

“I’ll take her back up,” Calvin said. When her father put her down Calvin held out his hand and she took it. He led her up the stairs, one step at a time, and when she saw the candle glow at the end of the hall she thought they would go back to his room. But they went back to hers, instead. Her cake was sitting on her night table, the candle barely still alight.

“Blow it out,” he said.

“But the thingie.”

“Ruined,” he said. She started to cry again. She hadn’t ever totally stopped. “Just eat your cake,” he said.

“Let’s try again,” she said. “I won’t scream.”

“Too late. Now it’s not time anymore. Now it’s just another night. Now it’s just a candle and now they’re just cuts and now it’s just a cake. You better blow it out or you’ll miss your chance for a wish.”

She bent her head and struck, remembering to wish this time, wishing as many wishes as she could hold at once in her head: Let it taste as good as it looks, let there be a pony under my bed tomorrow morning, let the toilet speak to me, let the cake never end, let me and him share it all night tonight, and let him never go, not anywhere, not ever.